The helping professions have always been associated with high levels of stress and burnout because of the emotional intensity of the relationships with patients. The nature of hospice work can be both rewarding and challenging. Hospice workers encounter a variety of work- and client-related stressors. The work-related stressors they face include organizational stressors and role ambiguity they experience in their work environment. Social factors make up a third set of work-related stressors. Chronic exposure to these stressors may result in burnout if they are not adequately dealt with. Coping strategies can be divided into 3 categories, namely, problem-focused coping strategies, emotionally focused coping strategies, and ineffective coping strategies. The focus of this research is to determine how the stressors experienced by hospice workers in and outside the working environment as well as the coping strategies adopted by them can be used to predict the extent to which they experience burnout. The findings of this study suggest that hospice workers do experience a great deal of burnout, which affects their work performance and general functioning. The burnout is mainly the result of work-related stressors. Recommendations to alleviate this problematic situation are made.
Over the past several decades, nurses have been increasingly theorizing about the relationships between culture, health, and nursing practice. This culture theorizing has changed over time and has recently been subject to much critical examination. The purpose of this paper is to identify the challenges impeding nurses' ability to build theory about the relationships between culture and health. Through a historical overview, I argue that continued support for the essentialist view of culture can maintain a limited view of complex race relations. I also argue that attempts to apply culture theory, without knowledge of important historical, political, and economic factors, has often resulted in oversimplified versions of what was originally intended. Furthermore, I argue that individual-level interventions alone will be insufficient to address health inequities related to culture. Despite new critical conceptualizations of culture and the uptake of cultural safety, nursing scholars must better address the broader organizational, population, and political interventions needed to address inequities in health. I conclude with suggestions for how nurses might proceed with culture theorizing given these challenges.
In this study, we examine British Columbia’s Hospital Association conference records (1918–31) to understand how place, gender, and profession shaped debates about hospital standardization during the interwar period. The conference records reveal that hospital standardization was conceptualized as the conformity of smaller, peripheral hospitals to larger metropolitan ones. Arguments about how to best address the gaps in small hospitals were often directed to elite nursing leaders, who suggested improved nursing education as a solution. Hospital affiliation was recommended to ensure adequate training for rural nurses by moving trainee nurses from rural to urban hospitals during the last year of their education. Yet the way that affiliation was conceived was more aligned with the professional goals of the nursing elite, rather than the needs of rank-and-file nurses in small hospitals. These ideas ultimately worked to support the goals of standardization, but obscured the divergent needs of small community hospitals.
Researchers can better address bias and reinforcement of power relations through reflexivity. Bias can be reduced by making explicit values that may privilege particular decisions and observations throughout the research process. Researchers can also reduce bias via relationality or giving participants equal power in decision making and taking action towards social justice. When researchers engage in reciprocity they encourage participants to contribute to all stages of the research process and therein equalise power relations.
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